This title is a metaphor referring to the 1990s public service announcement from Luchemos por la vida in Argentina, which aimed to raise awareness about the dangers associated with speeding while driving.
Having pointed out in several passages of the book the speed of the changes we are experiencing, we often find it difficult to understand how challenging it is to live in a society that wants everything right now. This obsession with immediacy has led us to have markets like cryptocurrencies that operate 24/7, prompting us to wonder: how much longer until the stock exchanges of the world’s major markets adopt that model? This has also led us to have speed dating through apps, whose real business model is not to find you an ideal partner but to make you return to the app, and the algorithm knows that. Hell, even delivery apps today offer delivery in less than 10 minutes, all because we’ve become too lazy to walk 100 meters to our nearest store to buy some snacks. Charles Hummel was right when he wrote in 1960 that we live under the tyranny of the urgent, and that’s not good because, increasingly, the urgent is winning over the important.
Without intending to defend past and present leaders who have led us to the current state of affairs, the speed demanded by the tyranny of the urgent does not help current leaders. Today, people demand immediate solutions from their newly elected politicians, just as they expect that new set of dishes they bought online to arrive today rather than tomorrow, as if it were a matter of life and death. The paradox of this is that today’s state leaders have much more information available to justify their decisions than their predecessors, but as a society, we have taken away a fundamental attribute: time. A political leader cannot be a prisoner of immediacy with every decision they make, because, unlike the role of a group of activists, a stockbroker, or someone who just ordered a cheddar burger through an app on their smartphone, a political leader must consider the interests and possible consequences of their decision across various interconnected groups of stakeholders. Let’s not hide. We ourselves demand more growth, faster, and this, at some point, is contradictory to all the crises we recognize around us and ask to be resolved quickly. Also, as we already know, governments that do not listen to their citizens eventually see how they make themselves heard, both in the streets and on social networks.